Bottles

Bottles
 
 
The secrets of the world
            are bottled up –
            here, in this dusty place;
 
Bottled up in haphazard
            containers labeled
            “bark powder”
            and “turkey rhubarb”.
 
It’s hard to tell if it is
            a scientists’ laboratory
            or a witch’s lair.
 
Everything is labeled,   
            and categorized,
            and contained.
 
The glass stoppers,
            stuffed with butcher’s paper,
            assure that no secrets escape,
            no magic is revealed.
 
Inside the glistening glass
            the beauty of the world
            lays dormant,
            waiting for an alchemist,
            or a conjurer
            or a thief.

I love to go to museums.  In museums, all the things of life and death are categorized and quantified and  contained.  It is easy to keep everything straight in your mind when you are in a museum.  Everything has its receptacle and its label and its number.  Sometimes, things can get mysterious, though.  I was once in a museum in Oxford where there were all these instruments from The Middle Ages -- gauges, compasses,telescopes, astrolabes. I wondered who had used them, who had touched them.  Maybe Galileo. Maybe Newton. . The science museum there was interesting, too, with artifacts all jumbled inside big glass boxes and cabinets -- all pushed in together as if waiting to be shipped off to a huge garage sale. Sometimes, these instruments and old glass bottles from early science labs, mineral specimens and animal specimens remind me of the tales of the alchemists -- always trying to turn the ordinary and every day objects of life into treasure.  It is a pity that with all their knowledge, they couldn't see that ordinary things are already treasure. .